I use abstraction to break down distinctions between system and intuition, space and light, abjection and desire. Abstraction's ability to easily slip into surrounding territories of figuration and spatial illusion are both paradox and lure. In these painting modalities, I seek to create tension between the materiality and the image. Surfaces underscore a history and decision-making process, which can be charted back mark-by-mark. Imagery is driven by a formal rigor that is self-aware of materiality. Sharp, thick, precise, hesitant, aggressive, wobbly, and frail; leaks, eddies, and snags are secreted throughout. When a stain becomes a trompe l’oeil shadow, or drips become hardedge vibrations, the painting arrives at a moment of threshold. Compressions of time and space, along with accumulations of texture and touch constitute the composition. The picture plane is thus an index of a thoughtful and deliberate process, structured to derail somewhere between point A and B. These derailments and erasures are generative failures, incorporated to become traces and veils giving the sensation of space billowing forward and receding. Trespassing through these visual modes make the painting process an active search for form and meaning, both for myself and for the viewer as well. Through painting I explore how knowledge is an empirical product inscribed both in and by the body. This aesthetic isn’t transcendent, but intricate and corporeal. These works do not beg the question why forms begin and exist, but how they will play out.
Nicole Mauser (b. Indianapolis) currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. She obtained an MFA from The University of Chicago (2010) and a BFA from Ringling College of Art & Design (2006). Mauser was a 2011 recipient of a Post-MFA Teaching Felllowship and recipient of Student Fine Art Fund Grant for travel/research in Berlin from The University of Chicago. Exhibitions include Reynolds Gallery, (Richmond, VA) Ft. Gondo (St. Louis, MO), Carrie Secrist Gallery (Chicago, IL), H&R Block Artspace (Kansas City, MO), Center for Art+Culture (Aix-en-Provence) and AR Gallery (Milan). Collections include The Alexander (Indianapolis, IN) and The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS). Mauser contributes writing to Newcity, Bad at Sports, 8 ½ x 11, and Art Practical. Mauser was a co-founder of the artist run gallery, PLUG Projects and a co-founder of the Kansas City Plein Air Coterie (KCPAC).